A senior Department of Homeland Security official revealed Wednesday that election systems in 21 states were targeted by Russian cyberattacks during the 2016 election.
Acting DHS Undersecretary Jeanette Manfra confirmed in a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing what has been previously reported: that Russian operatives tried to interfere with the U.S. electoral infrastructure itself.
“We have evidence of election-related systems in 21 states that were targeted,” Manfra testified, declining to disclose which specific states were targeted.
Manfra also said she would not share which states had data “exfiltrated” from their voting systems in an open hearing.
According to a June Bloomberg report based on interviews with anonymous officials, Russian hackers attempted to delete or alter voter data in Illinois and successfully accessed a campaign finance database in another state. That report said that voter databases and software systems were targeted in a total of 39 states.
As other intelligence officials have previously testified, both Manfra and Sam Liles, acting director of the DHS’ Cyber Division, told the Senate Intelligence panel that the actual vote count was not affected by cyberattacks.
“None of these systems were involved in vote tallying,” Liles testified.
Owners of all of the targeted voting systems and the states in which data was compromised were all notified, according to the DHS officials.
I remember a time when this sort of news would have been alarming to the public at large.
And still Congress has done absolutely nothing about it. Goopers especially have no problem ignoring this as a problem. They are still fucking debating whether it actually happened, or if its really all that bad like they’re being told by our intelligence services, repeatedly. Minimizing the extent of the interference isn’t going to solve this before the next election and yet, that’s exactly where we’re at…with Congress continuing to play blind, deaf and ignorant.
Same here. I’ve been waiting for the Julius and Ethel moment. Which would be ironic since Roy Cohn was Trump’s mentor.
If a couple of black men had done this, what would the GOP response have been?
I’m going out on a limb here, but I’ll bet the 21 states hacked were Blue or Purple in complexion…